My first widget

I went over to amazon and signed up to become an affiliate. I created my store title, 'books in my library, software on my computer, technology at my finger tips' I went through my personal library and then added those books to the store. Everything is editable so I looked at, changed it, changed it again. I'll refine it as time goes by. The code necessary for it to show up on my blog was generated for me at the amazon site. I pasted it right into this blog with simplicity. So now it is on right column of this page, titled, 'Favorite Books in my Library'. That is a widget. (In a month or so I may change the title to somthing else like, 'What every Genealogist must have') So now I can go over to Amazon and custom add all those things of interest to a genealogist. Amazon has such a wide variety of items, from books, software, and technology. I also put a widget on my 'Scogings Mckenzie Genealogy' site. That was a little more tricky, but if you look at the source code for the site you will see how simple that was as well. For a genealogist these ads could pay for the costs putting up a site and other expences. Now I think I will look for other sites I can get widgets from and add them. It is all free to do. It don't cost anything. If you click though my widget to buy something I get a small percentage, amazon gets a small percentage, and the seller gets his cut.

Salt Lake City

The construction near the temple in Salt Lake moves on. The genealogy library is a half block from this contruction. The CrossRoads and ZCMI malls are gone. The trax train is one bright spot in all this. It is quite easy to to get out and in of the downtown area on the train.

FamilySearch Wiki

The Wiki has been around for some years. I recently started to contribute some of my knowledge and writing skills. There appears to be a lack of contributors. On my user page you can click on the history button and see contributors to the page. Every page has this button. You can see the date I made a change to the page and even see how it has changed over time. It you click on 'contribs' you will get a list of every contribution I have ever made to the wiki; talk about transparency. People get the idea that once it is there that that is the ways it is. Your not suppose to get to attached to what you write since someone may come along and rewrite or change it. In my short time in contributing I do not see this happening. As writing is a developing process you will have to develop your own writings. I remember when I was developing a page for GENUKI, I would write something and then some weeks later I would read it again and then I could see how I could refine it. Look for a topic or place that you can make a contribution to and start writing. If what you want to write about has no topic or place then it is quite easy to add a new page. The whole process is user friendly. If you can create a blog you surely can write in a wiki.

Creating a Web Page

I have over the years created various web pages from scratch. I finally settled on using style sheets. The typical websites have used tables for the most part and many of the browsers only supported tables or did not fully support style sheets. If you went to the page with different browsers and different versions you will get a different look and layout. Code can be put in the pages to accomdate these differences but I don't have the knowledge to add that kind of code. The pages I have created with style sheets is for a parish in Scotland named, Urr. Urr parish page is at this address. The google map on the page took some doing but I got it on there. There is number of pages related to this page that I used style sheets for. For long list of names I used tables which are well suited for name list. The lay out of the pages is using style sheets. This tells you what you can do if you have access to some small list for a community and you would like to share them. you could actually copy my code and add your own text and dialogue. I have some banners on the pages that could have created some income but now there are not active since they created no traffic the service disabled them. I need to replace them with new affiliates. Apparently some of the big companies require a certain amount of traffic or they axe you. There are plenty of affilities to replace them.

Unemployed Genealogist

I would say that no genealogist is unemployed since there is always a stone to be turned over. However in this day when so many are unemployed it does bring to mind the fact that many who are unemployed have a project to work on. There are many skills a researcher acquires in the quest to find one ancestors. The first skills I learned was how to operate a computer. It expanded to writing, source citations, scanning, web pages, etc. Also, how to manage a database and create a reliable genealogy that will stand the test of time. Much of this knowlege comes from attending genelaogy conferences. I do not want to be considered a gatherer of names. I must admit that a gather has a place in the genealogy community but a true researcher is one step a head of a gatherer. A researcher knows why that name is there and where the details of the person were obtained. It may not be on the website but if you were to ask them they would point to a record that help them draw the conclusion. However, a sourceless gedcom is a starting place from which to create a reliable genealogy of a family.

Scogings Mckenzie

Scogings and variants; Scoggins, Scroggins, Scoging, Scoggin: Families originated from Suffolk, England. Few have been traced to the United States and some to Australia. The research is on my website http://donjaggi.net/winnifred/index.php.
Mckenzie: My family lived in Kirkcudbrightshire and you may be surprised that there were not many in the county. No Mckenzie's from this line are a live today. My great grandfather moved to Barre, Vermont in 1890. He worked in the granite sheds as a granite cutter, as he did in Dalbeattie. He started to go by Mackenzie instead of Mckenzie. around 1900.

BYU Computerized Conference

I have just attended the conference at BYU. Last year I could not get in because it was full. this year I had no problem getting into it as I paid at the door. I had no problem getting into any of the classes which is a change from other years. The talk is about New Family Search which is the online genealogy program that is being slowily releaased to members of the LDS Church. Much of utah does not have it yet. Eventually anyone in the world will be able to have an account. I would assume that that is many years off. There are many software programs that are becoming affiliates of New Family Search. If they want to survive I suppose they need to become appart of the effort since the LDS Church commands quite an audience of researchers.
One talk that caught my eye was the 'Voice Rcoginition Software' Apparently this technology has really become user friendly and accurate with faster and faster machines able to process the speech very quickly. I could write this at a fraction of the time using such software. 'Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 10' appears to be a favorite. I look forward to trying it. The usefulnes of this software comes in handy when one want to share your thoughts as the words flow instead of typing out the words. I was impressed by the talks that talked about networking on various social networks, blogging, and tracking events that pertain to areas of interest using RSS feed. Google has various free features that are quite useful to researching and they are free. The purpose of the conference was to create ideas on how to connect with other people and new technology in order to make the research experience more enjoyable, efficient, and faster. (my opinion)